Nieuw Letterkundig Magazijn. Jaargang 12

Conversation with the Wanderer

What I want, he says, perhaps
I wanted to be a bird, a swallow
I saw, there, high in the mountains,
and wanted to stay there myself

in the shadow of the house by the river
where he nested, from where he flew up.

I remember the return,
the warm twilight on the terrace,
how I sat there, following the meanders
of the river into the fields, the hazy lines
of the mountains up into the distance,
the flight of a swallow -
until he disappeared.

I was tired and went up again in thought
into the mountains, higher and higher,
to that lonely, lucid world of rock,
sat there again in the wind and gazed
into the depths.

Perhaps, he says, I want something
I can look at for ever, that house
down there, the nest I have myself
deserted,

and the meanders of the river, the lines
of the mountains, laid still at last,

as it was there, the moment I
disappeared from view, something

that exists beyond myself.

James Brockway

Het gedicht van Rutger Kopland is ontleend aan de bundel Voor het verdwijnt en daarna. Amsterdam 1985. De vertaling van James Brockway aan: Rutger Kopland. A world beyond myself. Selected poems translated from the Dutch by James Brockway. London 1991.